Archive for the ‘Success story’ Category

The Sydney-based business started 10 years ago with a $10 per day budget as a side hobby for CEO and founder Tony Nash and now turns over $40 million per year.

Nash, a web marketer, said Booktopia first started in 2004 as an “evening side project” with his brother Simon Nash, sister Elana Traurig and brother-in-law Steve Traurig.

“I started my first internet business 18 years ago and we (the family group) had been running companies together,” he said. “For the first three years, we used another company to manage our website, because we never thought it’d be anything.”

Three years later, Nash said, they bought some shelves on eBay, rented a 60sm m site in North Sydney and started managing Booktopia themselves.

Since that time, it’s grown by leaps and bounds and now has a huge warehouse full of stock and welcomes Australia’s biggest authors in for book signings.

Australian app development company MOKO Social Media will soon be listed on the NASDAQ.

The company’s public offering price is set to be between $US7.50-9.00 per American depositary shares (ADS), with each ADS representing 40 ordinary fully paid MOKO shares. That is equivalent to a price range of $A0.20- 0.24 per share.

The free app is to be adopted across 700 colleges by the end of September, with a reach of 10 million possible users. This will allow advertisers to directly target a highly attractive and segmented audience.

Chairman Greg McCann said the possibilities of this audience are part of the reasoning behind the ASX-listed company’s decision to dual list.

“[The US] is a very big market, and it’s a very sophisticated market — We really wanted to give American investors the opportunity to invest, because they were probably more likely to put a truer value on the stocks that you would in Australia,” he said.

“There’s not a lot of technology stocks here, particularly doing what we’re doing, which is really pushing the boundaries into a new area.”

An Australian online security startup has won the backing of the Singapore government.

Singapore government-owned Assurity Trusted Solutions has entered a strategic alliance with Melbourne identity verification specialist iSignthis to provide identity verification for its OneKey two-factor authentication token. The government intends the token to be used as a national standard.

As part of the agreement it has also picked up rights to supply the tokens and its security network internationally in other markets. Assurity plans to distribute the OneKey token as a smartphone application for Android and iOS devices.

iSignthis chairman Tim Hart said the company had set its sights on south-east Asia and Europe.

“The citizens and residents of Singapore, the EU, most of south-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand will benefit from [evidence of identity] and [two-factor authentication] services being executed online. We look forward to building on our strategic alliance with other products and services going forward,” Hart said.

Australia continues to attract online businesses from overseas and the latest to open a branch in the country is San Francisco-based Eventbrite.

Eventbrite, an online platform that allows users to promote and sell tickets to live events, will open an office in Melbourne soon, while file-sharing service Hightail (previously known as YouSendIt) has already opened its Asia-Pacific headquarters in the city.

Eventbrite’s husband-and-wife founders, Julia and Kevin Hartz, visited the city to formalise a sublease deal with start-up 99Designs to house the beginnings of the company’s fifth international office. The company, launched in the US in 2006, already has offices in San Francisco, London, Argentina and Brazil.

The Australian office will focus on sales and marketing. “Australia has always been one of our core international markets since the beginning of time,” said Julia. “We really started to see traction in 2008, just a couple of years in [from launching]. We have localised the site for Australia but we are now interested in really getting in there and having a strong presence.”

VentureCrowd, an Australian online equity based crowdfunding platform, has officially opened for business in the country.

The VentureCrowd platform allows investors to receive equity in high growth-potential startups, making them shareholders in the startup ompanies.

It opened Feb. 20 with over 200 registered investors and 36 startups which have been pre-screened by the best Australian accelerators, incubators, angel groups and university programs.

Artesian Venture Partners, one of Australia’s leading early stage venture capital firms, developed the platform.

According to Artesian managing partner Jeremy Colless, there are a very large number of sophisticated investors in Australia who have not previously invested in the startup space.

“The wholesale investor market in Australia is large with 207,000 wealthy individuals in Australia sitting on $US625 billion ($684 billion) worth of assets,” Says Colless. “Until now there have been major barriers to entry for investors in startups. An investor either had to have a large amount of money and time available to screen and review each potential startup investment personally, or had to commit as much as $250,000 to a venture capital fund to qualify as a limited partner.”

When Jane Cay bought an existing retail business in the small New South Wales town of Cooma in 2004, it was an eclectic mix of saddlery, Akubra hats and women’s fashion and employed five staff.

After removing the outfitters merchandise and honing in on women’s fashion, the business began to grow solidly at a rate of 10-20% per year. And in 2006, given the growth in online business, Cay made the decision to take Birdsnest online.

“We quickly realised that we weren’t in the business of selling dresses — we were in the business of solving a woman’s wardrobe dilemma,” Cay says.

She did a lot of online research to get her website up and running and develop the brand, focusing on giving online customers the same high standard of customer service that the in-store customers received.

Cay’s thorough planning and commitment to the website and customer service has paid off: since the website started, the business has grown to more than 100 team members, the website records five million page views or 500,000 visits every month, and it sells to people all over Australia and the world.

For Kirsten Devitt, starting a business was a dream come true, but she couldn’t have done it without the power of online retail.

“Once you’re online, you can build your confidence slowly,” says Devitt, who is from Brisbane, and who sells handmade jewellery from her store EachToOwn.

About two years old, Devitt’s online business allows her to earn a decent income while caring for her young son. But she would never have considered becoming a business owner if she had to start with a physical store, a staff and a business loan.

“There is too much at stake in owning a store,” she said. “I couldn’t afford to outlay a crazy amount of money for something that might fail.”

While big businesses in Australia continue to be prone to failure, their smaller counterparts are doing well, starting out small and gaining a dedicated following of customers the old-fashioned way.

These small mum and pop shops sell anything from handcrafted goods to greeting cards to furniture, utilizing their online presence to sell their wares both locally and around the world.

“These businesses create niche products that may only tailor to the one per cent. But when you look at the world as your customer base, that one per cent is big business,” says Jason Chuck from Etsy Australia, which supports businesses in selling their handmade goods.

Figures from Etsy Australia show that 90% of sellers are women.

The online marketplace launched in Australia in 2005 and now has tens of thousands of sellers, with 60 per cent of orders going to international buyers.

Markets and online stores are allowing artistic Australians to start small and find their niche customer base before expanding.